1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to an apparatus and a method which display various types of contents digitized from paper-based contents, such as cartoons, newspapers, magazines, documents, textbooks and reference books.
2. Description of the Related Art
In Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-226255, a reproduction sequence of frames of a cartoon is determined on the basis of a sequence assumed by an author of the cartoon as a sequence of frames. For example, identification numbers are assigned to respective frames; the reproduction sequence is determined as data of disposition of the identification numbers. In order to facilitate reading on a size of a display apparatus for reproduction, a plurality of display positions may be determined in one large frame on a space of the cartoon, and the positions may be predetermined as frames.
In Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2007-164550, a file of a Flash cartoon content is created according to a preset frame display sequence. This Flash content file is created by a personal computer performing a prescribed Flash creation application pursuant to an instruction by a business owner. Accordingly, the Flash content file is created in which each page includes image data of the page and a frame display sequence instruction (frame display sequence).
In Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open No. 2002-41401, a plurality of articles published in an information providing medium, such as a newspaper and a magazine, are stored as article information while a style in which the articles are published in the information providing medium is maintained, by storing data created by scanning the article. A piece of article information is identified among the stored pieces of article information on the basis of instruction information received from an information terminal via a communication line. Output information is generated on the basis of the identified piece of article information. The generated output information is transmitted in order to be output to a recording medium. Accordingly, information intended by a user can be acquired in the style published in the information providing medium such as a magazine.
Other conventional arts related to the present invention include Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Nos. 2001-25024 and 11-272399.
The arts which preliminarily determine the dispositions of respective frames by a user's manual operation and input the determined data as with Japanese Patent Application Laid-Open Nos. 2007-226255 and 2007-164550, are very complicated. The conventional arts do not refer to a device which sequentially distributes digitized content to terminals with various specifications and forms according to the data and causes the terminals with various specifications and forms to reproduce the content.